In hindsight, we all recognize what an unmitigated disaster Georgia’s 2013 recruiting class turned out to be.
What’s sometimes forgotten is the amount of fan angst there was about it at the time, as my post on the subject in the immediate wake of signing day indicated.
Sure, we didn’t know that Grantham would be departing the program in a year, that Pruitt would start cleaning out the dead wood and that some of the bunch would clear themselves out through questionable behavior, but there was plenty of grumbling as it was over Tunsil’s last minute departure for Ole Miss and Garner’s snagging a couple of key players on the defensive line at his new gig.
Still, this was the money ‘graph:
What the success of this year’s class boils down to – what the success of any recruiting class at Georgia boils down to – is context, that is, how does it fit into the way the coaches have molded the program and where they’re trying to take it. Brice Ramsey’s rawness means nothing right now, or even next season, but if he never develops the way Bobo thinks he can, then, yeah, it’s a big whiff. But you look to future classes for insurance against that costing your program overly much.
In the end, there weren’t enough future classes for Richt to overcome the vaporization of that one.
Get The Picture 
It was very disappointing. Brice’s failure to develop made it tragic.
Of course, had Bobo stopped by Deshaun’s house later that day and gotten his commitment everything would have been different.
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Yep. Tunsil, Watson, and a healthy Gurley and CMR would probably still be the coach.
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Guys, CMR got fired in 2015 and Georgia had a 10 win season that year. How many more wins would that team have had if Tunsil had signed with Georgia? Not many I suspect. Watson, too. If you are talking about 2016 how many more wins would Georgia have had if the team had a HC and OC that maximized the abilities of the players instead of trying to prove some sort of point. CMR wore out his welcome and it was time for him to go. HE will come out of this fine at Miami. It remains to be seen if the same can be said for UGA.
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I’m guessing you saw Hale’s recent piece about the ESPN top 150 players in the 2013 class. It seems the class of 2013 was a bust generally.
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“But I’m less concerned about a class of thirty-two completely imploding than I am about a class half that size doing so. Especially when this year’s bunch looks credibly deep. But none of that should mean Richt starts a trend of failing to get some of those five-star in state studs, either.”
damn….hindsight’s a bitch…
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Of 72 QBs that signed with Power 5 programs in 2013, 59 did not finish their career with the team they originally signed with.
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I think what I forget is that this was the class coming off the SECCG vs. Bama.
I don’t buy the whole ‘class was down’ garbage either…they missed on Nkemdichie, Montravious Adams, Vonn Bell, Carl Lawson, Alvin Kamara, Tyren Jones, Demarcus Robinson, and Kesley Griffin. Gallman, too. Plus people complain about Ramsey over D Watson…but the fact that they took Ramsey over Dobbs turned out just as glaring. I think that’s the only class in the last several years that didn’t have any kids in the top 50 247 composite.
Compare that to 2017 where we are looking at 6 in the top 50.
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Great point. Our staff just didn’t put in the work and the results showed.
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“Coaches don’t want to spend all summer recruiting.”
Mack Brown on Summertime
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Bobo got super lazy in his quarterback evals after Murray/Mettenberger. Just a bunch of awful signings that have left us in a dreadful spot in the last three years.
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“Lazy” seems a little strong, sometimes you just miss. The NFL has college play to use, which seems much more reliable than pre-adult HS as an indicator. How many 1st round whiffs have you seen at that level just in the past several years. Brice was a highly sought after QB, even though I was concerned about the system he played in in HS. Would we do it differently in hindsight? I saw nothing that made me think Bobo wasn’t working all out before he left, and that would make no sense given the money available as a HC, and that was a strong incentive for him to dig hard.
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It’s lazy to blame Bobo. Did we miss on LeMay and Ramsey? Yes but so did everyone else. Did we miss on Park? We’ll never know because Schottenheimer never gave the guy a chance after Bobo left.
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Park is now starting at another Power 5 program. Of all of the QBs signed by the Dawgs it seems he was the best one–the players all said so, too.
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While there’s no question that for the past 4 years the 2013 class has been a disaster, I would argue that for this one season, 2017, the class will actually be better than most other SEC school’s 2013 classes. We’ll have John Atkins, Davin Bellamy, Reggie Carter, and Glenn Welch competing for starting jobs while Jordan Davis, Brice Ramsey, and Aulden Bynum will provide needed depth. That’s one advantage of having a large class, you get a lot of guys redshirting.
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Good point, it was disappointing as it turned out, but not a total loss. Bellamy surprised me by coming back because he had really stepped his game up significantly toward the end of the season. He may be the one coming back that sees the most benefit of an additional year, Carter and and Atkins give me a warm feeling whether as a starter, or quality depth. And that class had some stars as well, we tend to dwell on the misses.
The size of that 2013 class may have led to feeling we could take some chances, ones that didn’t pan out. We need to move on from autopsying that class and look forward. Somehow they contributed enough to keep us from totally tanking like so many do when a class doesn’t pan out. Back to Atlanta as a parting gift, maybe more.
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To me, the really frustrating part was intentionally undersigning (only 19) in 2012 because they thought the 2013 class was so talented especially in-state. When Richt claimed in his press conference on signing day I wondered what the hell he was doing. Had they just wiffed on a bunch of recruits in 2012 it would have felt better.
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Yeah, that looks even worse in hindsight in a way. You had the 2011 “Dream Team” class that panned out to the point that you went from 6-7 to the SECCG and they tried to put that momentum on hold to gamble on 2013.
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Limiting signings in 2012 was definitely a mistake and added to the problems created by the 2013 class.
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“Whack”
Bad Horse.
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